Golden Cookie
The Golden Cookie (not to be confused with the Red Cookie) is an object that shows up on the screen in a random position during normal gameplay. It remains on the screen for 13 seconds, slowly fading into nothing (the time it stays on-screen can be increased, see below). If it is clicked before it disappears entirely, it will grant the player one of four semi-random outcomes. You can see how many Golden cookies you have clicked in the Stats menu. The menu also used to list how many Golden cookies have been missed, but Orteil removed that feature due too many players complaining that it's "messing with their OCD". Outcomes *'49.00417%' to get "Frenzy": Get x7 cookie production for 77 seconds. Affects Cookies per Second, but does NOT affect Cookies per Click (although it indirectly affects cookies per click with the Plastic/Iron/Titanium/Adamantium Mouse upgrades). *'49.00417%' to get "Lucky!": Get an instant boost of cookies equal to 10% of the current cookies plus 13, or 20 minutes worth of cookies (which is CPS*1200) plus 13, whichever is less. (Stacks with Frenzy; if Frenzy is active when you get "Lucky," you can potentially get 20x7 = 140 minutes worth of cookies) *'1.6625%' to get "Clicking Frenzy": Gives x777 cookies per click for 13 seconds. **Only works for manual clicking. **Stacks with Frenzy. If Frenzy is active when you get Clicking Frenzy, you can potentially get x5439 cookies per click. *'0.32916%' to start a "Cookie Chain": The first cookie you click in the chain will reward you with +6 cookies, and 3 seconds after being clicked another cookie will appear which grants +66 cookies, and then the third +666 cookies, and so on. Every time you click the golden cookie, after it rewards cookies, it runs a couple checks. The first five will always appear (as long as you don't miss clicking them), but after that, there are a few things that can cause the chain to break: ** Missing a cookie (at any point in the chain, even the first five) will break the chain. Each cookie stays onscreen for 6 seconds. ** Every cookie past the 5th has a 10% chance to not appear. ** Clicking a cookie past the 5th one that awards more than the amount you had when you clicked it will end the chain. You still get the payout for that cookie, but no more will appear for that chain. (As of v1.033 this feature actually works.) : The longest the chain can go for is 13 consecutive cookies, at which point you will have earned a total of 7,407,407,407,397 cookies from it. Golden Cookies will not start chains until you have at least 100,000 cookies baked all time. All chances are calculated from the source code. Note: These numbers only apply exactly for your first cookie. There is an 80% chance that the cookie will be forced to be different from the previous effect. Upgrades Once the Golden Cookie disappears, a new one will appear in 5-14 minutes. This time is halved with the Lucky Day upgrade and halved again with the Serendipity upgrade. These upgrades also double the length of time the cookie remains onscreen. Having both upgrades means a golden cookie will take between 75 and 210 seconds (in steps of 15 seconds) to spawn, and it will remain on the screen for 52 seconds. The Get Lucky upgrade doubles the time of the Golden Cookie's effects, however it does not double increase in cookie production. Note that all upgrades have the same effect on the Red Cookie. Strategy The game will automatically save when golden cookies have a chance to spawn (meaning that it will save 5 minutes after your last golden cookie click with no upgrades, 2.5 minutes with only Lucky Day unlocked, ect). Keep an eye out for it, so you know when you can find the golden cookies. Before obtaining the golden cookie upgrades you can time roughly when the next one will appear based on when you clicked on the last one. The minimum time between each is 5 minutes without upgrades. This makes getting the 7 and 27 clicks needed to buy Lucky Day and Serendipity easier. After you get the upgrades there's less of a need to time them as they appear frequently. With both upgrades, if you get a Frenzy outcome; the earliest time a new Golden Cookie can spawn is two seconds before the frenzy ends. By keeping a large sum of cookies in your bank at any given point you can maximize the returns of the "Lucky" outcome. The maximum available from a Lucky outcome is 1,200 times your current CpS (20 minutes of production,) or 10% of your current banked cookies. The game chooses the lower number, so for maximum gain from lucky cookies you need to have 12,000 times your CpS in the bank. If you have that amount in your bank, both upgrades and get all the golden cookies on average every 4 minutes and 50 seconds you'll recieve 20 minutes worth of production from "Lucky" and 7.7 minutes from "Frenzy", which is equivalent to a 426% CpS bonus, not counting the other outcomes. This makes''' Lucky Day and '''Serendipity some of the single most powerful upgrades in the game, if you're willing to invest the time into watching for golden cookies. On the other hand, banking cookies ties up resources that you could use to buy cookie-producing buildings instead. With Serendipity, and assuming you hit all golden cookies, each banked cookie earns 0.1 cookie on average every 290 seconds, so each additional average cookie-per-second from "Lucky" costs 2900 cookies. As long as the price of buildings hasn't increased too much, buying them immediately without banking is a cheaper way to improve your CpS -- especially because "Frenzy" applies only to building income (roughly doubling every building's effective CpS) but doesn't affect the interest rate from banking. If the building you're considering buying costs less than 2900 times twice its net CpS contribution, you should buy it as soon as you can afford it. In practical terms, if your antimatter condensers are upgraded to String theory but not Large macaron collider, you should start banking only when the next condenser will cost about 14.000.000.000 times your CpS multiplier. This threshold will be proportionally higher if you don't anticipate hitting all of the golden cookies. *With the golden cookie frenzy, you can obtain Cps achievements before you have that Cps. For example, if you have 150 million Cps, and you get a frenzy, you will be boosted to 1 billion Cps, therefore obtaining the final Cps based achievement, Let's never bake again. *A trick to make golden cookies easier to see is to resize the browser window to an area roughly the size of a golden cookie. The golden cookie always appears somewhere within the area of the browser window. When the area is restricted in such a way it only takes a quick glance to check if a golden cookie has appeared. 'Get Lucky' Upgrade With the introduction of the Get Lucky upgrade, banking more than 12,000 seconds of cookies becomes a viable strategy. The doubled duration of the "Frenzy" outcome means "Lucky" golden cookies will give you up to 1,200 times your CpS including the boost from the frenzy, or 8,400 times your base CpS (140 minutes of cookies!). With the probablity of doubling results reduced, the golden cookie following a "Frenzy" has almost an 90% chance of being a "Lucky", and approximately a 60% chance of falling within the duration of the frenzy. The large cost of the Get Lucky '''upgrade as well as the significant amount of banking required restricts this strategy to the end game however. Also, 10% of the time you can chain frenzies like this even without '''Get Lucky, however, the window is only 2 seconds so this can be difficult to pull off. Once you have Get Lucky, the "Clicking Frenzy" can appear while already in a "Frenzy". This can lead to massive cookie creation. If you also have all the "mouse" upgrades, giving you 4% of your CpS per click, with an average of 6 clicks per second for 25 seconds (you won't have the whole 26), you can receive up to 9 hours of production. Note that this also makes it entirely possible for a second "regular" Frenzy to occur whilst one is already in play. In this case, the effects do not stack; instead, it merely extends the duration of the 7x multiplier... to the 154 seconds following the second Golden Cookie click, not after the expiry of the first Frenzy. The brinksmanship of knowing just how long to leave a cookie on-screen before clicking it in order to maximise your cookie production thus becomes something of an art, unless you have a clock that shows seconds within your field of view and a good short-term memory. Category:Post 1.0 Updates Category:Gameplay